Delhi 6 Delhi Title Track Lyrics

One can learn a lot by eating with Indians
By Thomas Swick
The sharp joy you feel when your plane touches down is short-lived in India as you realize now you must get in a taxi. Goodbye order, upkeep, hygiene, caution. Hello dent king. Hello chaos.

On a Sunday evening at Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi, I plucked my bag and walked, just as Mrs. Grover had instructed, to the Pre-paid Taxi window. Then I headed with my receipt out into the melee. "Green Park," I said to my driver.
The sun slipped low behind a curtain of fog, smoke and dust. There was a s___iousness that you didn't find in Mumbai, but the buildings, even though newer, bore similar signs of deterioration. The streets were wider, but the drivers just as manic.
We turned down a lively shopping street, our headlights cutting through the dusk, scattering saris. After another turn we drove through an open gate and down a street of modern, tightly bunched houses, where Mrs. Grover, the woman who rented me a room, stood waiting.
Next day, I woke up and decided to walk up the street. There were sidewalks, but they had missing sections, uprooted sections, trees growing in the middle. Everyone used the street, which meant mostly men, in their light-colored shirts and dark faded pants. When females appeared -usually in salwar kameez, sometimes in saris- it was as if characters from a color film had been dropped into one in black-and-white.
Then, I steeled myself for another taxi ride and was dropped at the entrance to the Indira Gandhi House. It was a rambling white bungalow set behind hedges. The front rooms had been emptied of furniture and the walls hung with photographs. In the back of the house, the dining room, the study and the reception room were kept as they were when she was alive. Outside, a glass panel marked the spot where she fell after being shot by her Sikh bodyguards.
Back in Green Park I walked along the main shopping street, past the newsstand, the Madras Cafe, the sari store and into Evergreen, the famous sweetmeats shop. I chose a colorful a__ortment and carried the box to a young woman who gave me a receipt that I took to the counter.
On Wednesday morning I caught a taxi to Rajiv Chowk (Connaught Place). (Unlike Mumbai, Delhi is too spread out to explore on foot, and if it weren't, you'd almost always arrive covered in dust.) Getting out, I felt little of my usual relief. There was no sealing going on.

The tour
Our first stop was the Indira Gandhi house. The two Sikhs who killed her put down their guns and said: 'We've done our duty, now do yours.'
We drove along wide, tree-lined boulevards and came eventually to a great open s___e divided by a long ceremonial avenue. This was the Rajpath, stretching between India Gate and Rashtrapati Bhavan (the president's, formerly viceroy's, house). Fog deprived the mall of its grand sweep, but its individual pieces conveyed a sense of power.
The Sikh temple had a parking garage. We took off our shoes and socks in a side office, stepped into a little foot pool, entered the temple, descended some steps and filed into a hall where women sat hand-pressing roti.
Our next stop was the municipal crematorium. We walked with men carrying bundles of sticks. The mourners gather the wood themselves and burn the body. A group brought a draped corpse on a stretcher and set it down on a block before a mural of Shiva. Little arcs of water shot up from both sides, ritually cleansing the body, while a recorded jingle played.
After lunch, we plunged into Old Delhi. The tour guide went first, loping through streets packed with people, skirting rickshaws and carts, bouncing off porters bent double under sacks. He climbed an encrusted staircase that, halfway up, went pitch black and then, around a turn, filled with light and the suffocating dust of unnamable spices. We coughed and sneezed and covered our mouths while his white sneakers led fearlessly on.
The next morning, Mrs. Grover gave me a key chain as a farewell gift. At first I thought the three-pointed star on it was an ancient Hindu symbol but then I decided it was the Mercedes-Benz logo. I successfully waved off the maid, lugged my suitcase downstairs, and entered the taxi for the dreaded ride to the airport.